I can wholeheartedly recommend participating in this tournament as a student. I built a bot for BWAPI a few years back and it taught me a great deal about progr

I can wholeheartedly recommend participating in this tournament as a student. I built a bot for BWAPI a few years back and it taught me a great deal about programming in hostile environments against unreliable API's and with unreliable resources. And that's all before you even get to true AI. You can skip all that and just cut to the AI part by choosing to base your bot on one of the existing open source AI's that are already available and continuously improved by the community.